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New NTSB Chairman Brings Aviation Expertise To Job

Neither my bride nor I remember the year exactly, but we remember the event all too vividly. We were returning from family Christmas, and reaching the end of the hours-long, 550-mi. Interstate slog. Home was less than 7 mi. distant and the beds beckoned; it was about 2:30 in the ...

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A truly excellent piece on the NTSB. Exactly how I feel, and done so well. I have always respected the NTSB, and the new leadership is a good thing, but it is indeed flawed, and infected with political influence.

They tried to bring back the truth about TWA800, but the system made them fail. At least there are a few good men there. Their reports on 911 are superficial and suspect.

Good leadership is hard to find, and let's hope that Sumwalt can make it happen.

Folks, can you put your baggage and otherwise down for a minute, and look at the essence of the story...the NTSB is now being headed by a very qualified individual. That is goodness. Okay, and if you must, back to your pet theories...

A bit of background: the NTSB, as a comparatively-independent aviation accident-investigation agency, evolved out a 1931 crash of a wood-winged Fokker Trimotor (TWA 599) in the Kansas prairie, which killed national hero Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne

Rockne, a national icon of heroic sportsmanship, integrity and idealism, famed for his idealistic invocations -- at that time one of the most popular of all Americans. So his loss, in one of the first "major" airline crashes in America, was viewed as a national tragedy -- "a national loss" according to President Hoover.

The crash investigation -- which drug on for months -- became the first to have its findings demanded by, and disclosed to, the American public. However, the Bureau of Air Commerce (forerunner to today's FAA, which was overseeing the airlines), was investigating its own regulatory office in Kansas City (home of TWA), and there were hints that the relations between the three parties -- investigator, local office, and TWA -- were too chummy (and, after all, the Bureau of Air Commerce, in those days, was largely charged with promoting the airlines, as much as regulating them).

So the public's lack of faith in the aviation regulator's ability to investigate crashes -- where its own people could have contributed to the accident (in this case, inadequate regulatory oversight of the airilne's maintenance op's, in particular) -- led to pubilc and Congressional demands for an independent investigator. (The task was assigned, as I recall, to the Department of Commerce's Committee on Aviation Safety). Through various arrangments and agencies, over decades, the end result, decades later is today's NTSB.

MORAL: Even government regulators need to be regulated -- or at least overseen -- by a SEPARATE arm of government (a basic concept enshrined, already, in the Constitution, with its elaborate "separation of powers" between Executive, Legislative & Judicial.)

It's one of the things that makes American government far more functional and civilized than in most other countries around the world. Is it "just more government?" No -- it's safer government, for all.

While I tend to admire the NTSB, and believe it's led to a HUGE improvement in aviation safety, overall -- I'm very troubled with its seemingly reflexive tendency to approach GENERAL AVIATION investigations with the assumption that it's the pilot's fault -- unless something seems strangely unrelated to the pilot, or there is a pattern emerging with that particular type of operation, operator, manufacturer, model, or specific aircraft.

While NTSB investigators may note an inadequacy of aircraft or systems design, manufacture or maintenance, or operating environment, that is attributable to others -- they still generally stick the pilot with sole (or ultimate) blame.

This is how, in my humble opinion, so many GA crashes, and their underlying issues -- (e.g.: Bonanza post-B-model V-tails; Cessna seat rails; disintegrating Bellancas; countless fatal Ercoupe & Cub crashes in planes fraudulently sold as "the world's safest airplane"; overly-hot 20-series Lears (very risky for their era & target market) flown by dangerously under-screened pilots; trouble-prone Cessna/ARC avionics; planes designed with lousy engine-out or stall/spin-behavior, or with lethal gas tanks in the cockpit, or otherwise hopeless crash-survivability; etc.) -- go unresolved for so VERY long, at such high loss of life... with the NTSB habitually reluctant to truly blame anyone in general aviation but the pilot.

I think they're more thorough on commercial aircraft investigations. That's understandable, given the larger risk, or loss of life -- but that doesn't excuse defaulting to "the pilot did it" in the NTSB's necessarily less-probing GA crash investigations.

"Pilot-defamation by default" is not an acceptable substitute for a through, enlightening investigation, a realistic analysis, and a truly informative and useful report.

With the emerging era of DIGITAL aircraft avionics, instruments and systems -- which leave little or no post-crash evidence of their malfunctions and failures -- this issue is becoming increasingly important.

If you don't really know the cause -- and don't have the evidence, resources or time to investigate it enough to know for sure -- just admit you don't know, and move on.